saving energy

Commit yourself to being satisfied with less stuff, and to cultivating more meaning, in your life.

Choosing simple pleasures instead of overconsumption will help reduce energy needs.

RODALE NEWS, LENOX, MA—BP finally capped the well. I’m relieved, but I’m also afraid that the resulting pressure could cause unfixable leaks in the ocean floor. I’m holding my breath until the relief wells are completed next month, providing a lasting solution—to this oil spill. But what about the next one?

The gushing oil and the environmental devastation it's wrought have brought intense reactions—rage at BP, government moves to halt offshore drilling, renewed calls for green energy. However, to really fix the problem at the root of this disaster, we need to drill a little deeper.

THE DETAILS: Beneath BP’s negligence and the government's lax regulation lies a deeper truth: We are addicted to cheap energy. We represent less than 5 percent of the world’s population and consume 25 percent of its energy. We allow risky offshore drilling (there are now 27,000 abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone!), as well as dangerous mining for coal and hydrofracking for natural gas, because they support our consumption habit. If our demand for cheap energy were not so insatiable, it wouldn’t pay to spend millions on complex, expensive methods to extract its sources from the earth.

We are a nation of voracious consumers—of food, drugs, products, and energy. Unlike the majority of other parts of the world, our most common health problems are caused by overconsumption, rather than deprivation. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are diseases of too much, rather than too little. Our overconsumption of food destroys our personal health. Our overconsumption of energy is destroying the health of our planet.

WHAT IT MEANS: The solutions to overconsumption are both practical and spiritual. On a practical level, there are hundreds of ways to reduce your use of energy. On a spiritual level, we need to wake up and face what our energy feeding frenzy is distracting us from. When we make the choice to buy less, drive less, and consume less, we fill ourselves in other ways. A quiet walk in the woods, for instance, nourishes us in ways that a drive to the mall can’t. When the choices we make connect us more deeply with ourselves, our loved ones, and the earth, the energy consumption we forgo is replaced with spiritual vitality. Our movement toward voluntary simplicity feels like liberation, rather than deprivation.